I appreciate this thoughtful and detailed reply. I was thinking all those things in my head while reading as well, but couldn't bring myself to invest the time to address them all. I got the impression that the author wasn't someone who has a lot of experience building real-world predictive models otherwise they'd appreciate the trade-offs that need to be made sometimes to get something that works well and can be debugged/interpreted without too much trouble. Of course this isn't to say we shouldn't be striving to develop more interpretable solutions, but I don't think this paper is very helpful to due to its lack of rigor and straw-man tactics.